Kindness Gets Its Own Award

Newtown Group Honors 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon

Nine-year-old Mark DeLoughy huddled with other students in a corner of his third-grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary as the horrors of the Dec. 14 shooting echoed through the halls over the public-address system.

Two friends were nervous and crying. Mark leaned over, rubbed their backs, held their hands, reassured them and told them he would keep them safe.

"When we asked Marky, we said, 'Well, were you scared?' and he said, 'Well, a little, but, you know, I just had to make my friends feel better,'" said his aunt, Dody Flynn, also of Newtown. Flynn has older children who attended Sandy Hook school and she learned about Mark's thoughtfulness from parents of some of his classmates.

Mark, also known for his kindness to other children at a dance class Flynn teaches, is among about 100 young people who have been nominated for the first Charlotte Bacon Act of Kindness Awards. Named for one of the children killed in Newtown, the award is meant to recognize and encourage kindness among children 18 and younger. Newtown Kindness, sponsor of the awards, is one of the non-profit efforts that have blossomed since the slaying of 20 children and six adults in the Newtown school.

The awards will be announced Feb. 22nd, which would have been Charlotte's 7th birthday.

Newtown Kindness was created by Aaron Carlson whose daughter, Ava, was Charlotte's friend since they were babies together in the same play group. Like so many others, Carlson said he felt helpless after the tragedy.

"I'll tell you, I had this really, heavy cloud on me," Carlson said. "I was consumed with this. I was watching TV and not sleeping and stuff. When I went to Charlotte's service … I felt this cloud lift off of me … they mentioned my daughter in the service, and, at the wake, there's a picture of my daughter with these kids."

Only days after Charlotte's wake, Carlson decided to take action. It was Christmas Eve. He took his daughter for the first time to see a sprawling memorial of flowers and stuffed animals at the heart of Sandy Hook.

Walking along the sidewalk, Carlson met a visitor — an elementary school principal who had traveled from Little Rock, Ark. Scott Morgan, of McDermott Elementary in Little Rock, was as consumed as Carlson by the tragedy.

"I was glued to the TV all weekend long," Morgan said in a phone interview from his office in Arkansas this week. "And all weekend long I kept thinking, 'You know, I want my kids to do something'."

On the news, Carlson saw that there were 26 Christmas trees at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and he came up with the idea of making one ornament for each tree. The ornaments would have the name McDermott Elementary to show the school's support.

In less than a week, his students raised $950, which was more than enough to buy the pewter, angel-shaped ornaments at a Hallmark store that caught Morgan's eye, plus engraving costs. All the money was raised in two days at his Little Rock school, where 85 percent of his 425 students receive free or reduced-price school lunches.

When he flew north to spend Christmas with family in Pompton Lakes, N.J. he brought the angels. Then he drove 82 miles to Newtown to deliver them. During that visit, the Arkansas educator had a brief conversation with Carlson at a makeshift memorial in the center of Sandy Hook, a hamlet in Newtown.

Carlson was dumbstruck at Morgan's kindness.

"All night, Christmas Eve, you know, wrapping presents, all of a sudden I couldn't stop thinking about this guy," Carlson said. "He's here on Christmas Eve, and he's from Arkansas … I should have invited this guy over, or I should have said, 'Hey, you want to meet for coffee in the morning?'"

It was then that he decided he needed to do something himself. Acts of kindness had become a theme since Dec. 14th and he joined in, first e-mailing Charlotte's parents, Joel and JoAnn, to see if he could start an organization to honor their daughter.

The Bacons are among the families that have not taken a public role since the tragedy.

"It's the one thing that they want to support — the concept of kindness and working with kids," Carlson said. "They don't really want to be involved in a lot of the political stuff."

In late December, Carlson started a Facebook page and then a website, http://www.newtownkindness.com encouraging acts of kindness. The website has had 100,000 visitors and the Facebook page, Charlotte Bacon Act of Kindess Award, had 2,235 "likes" as of Wednesday afternoon. Various instances of kindness are recounted on the web site from as far away as Ohio, Colorado and England.

Charlotte's spirit has inspired adults as well, some who knew her and some who have come across the Facebook page.